Heavy swells in June have undermined the beach at Oamaru's foreshore "significantly'', the Waitaki District Council's roading manager says.
Further, in an assets committee report tabled today Michael Voss notes that progress on the council's planned erosion protection work for the site was happening "rather slowly''.
In May, Mr Voss told the Otago Daily Times he hoped the work would begin this winter.
Yesterday, he said the consenting process with the Otago Regional Council for the work was expected to be completed in August.
The council would then call for tenders for the planned installation of geotextile sand mattresses at the beach in front of a proposed 240m sea wall.
However, he said the project was progressing "business as usual'' with the council consultants OCEL Consultants NZ Ltd and the regional council's consenting process and he said his comment to the council's asset committee was due to the fact the beach continued to suffer the effects of erosion while the council could not implement its proposal to curtail it.
"It's 'slowly' from our [the council's] perspective,'' he said.
"It's a mobile beach. All these stone beaches are quite mobile.
"They're mobile and vertical. In other words, they'll dump a whole lot of metal, or rock or sand in there and then they'll take it out, but they've also got the incremental move inland as well.''
The planned erosion protection work would occur directly in front of 252 penguin nesting boxes, which the Oamaru Blue Penguin Colony monitors as a control group to compare to the colony at its tourism operation.
The colony's marine biologist, Dr Philippa Agnew, has endorsed the plan.
